Let me stress my point: I can use my favorite text editor and versioning
system for my blog, rather than some wimpy <textarea>.

Here comes trouble

Jekyll doesn’t do a lot, by design. Some manual labour is involved, which is
to be automated – because we don’t like manual labour, now do we? I’ve
written about some of my scripts to enhance Jekyll in separate posts:

Publication process

I have included all these snippets, and some others, in one big Rakefile in my
project directory. Whenever I am ready to publish my site to my server I can
simply call rake publish and it will let Jekyll re-generate my site, upload
all the files to the server and ping Google about my new sitemap.

Issues unresolved

First, since my entire website is now just static HTML it is no longer
possible to have comments on my site, unless I would use something like
Disqus. I’m fine without comments. Second, since Jekyll is Ruby gem,
writing more Ruby to add functionality to the website is easy – but actually
getting it in there is a little harder. Jekyll lacks a neat plug-in
solution. Luckily it’s easy to fork Jekyll on Github and hack away. Thirdly,
setting up archive pages, searching, RSS syndication, tagging and post
browsing take some manual labour, but for now I’m fine without them.
Jekyll is certainly not suited for everyone, but for simple sites it works fine.

Conclusion

Jekyll makes creating and maintaining websites fun, in a geeky kind of way. I
love the control it gives me. Tom Preston-Werner writes:

The distance from my brain to my blog has shrunk, and, in the end,
I think that will make me a better author.

I couldn’t agree more.

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Arjan van der Gaag

A thirtysomething software developer, historian and all-round geek. This is his blog about Ruby, Rails, Javascript, Git, CSS, software and the web. Back to all talks and articles?

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You cannot leave comments on my site, but you can always tweet questions or comments at me: @avdgaag.